Landscape Design Website for Design Studios and Design-Build Firms

A landscape design website has to sell an idea before anything is built. People hiring a garden designer are buying your taste and your process, so the site should show finished gardens, explain how a project moves from first sketch to planting, and make it clear what the design phase costs. We build these sites from $1,000, including the structure, copy, design, development, and basic SEO.

Who this kind of site is for

This page is for residential landscape design studios and design-build firms: teams that draw the plan and often install it too. The client is usually a homeowner with a budget for a garden, a terrace, or a full backyard redesign.

Licensed landscape architects have a different audience. Licensure is required to practice landscape architecture in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, and those firms often chase public and commercial work where qualifications and team credentials matter most. We cover that case separately on the landscape architect website page. Maintenance-heavy companies have their own needs as well, which is why a website for a lawn care company is built quite differently.

What a landscape design website should show

The short answer: proof of design thinking, with photos as supporting evidence. A gallery of forty unlabeled garden shots tells a visitor you've done work. It doesn't tell them why the work looks the way it does, or what it would be like to hire you.

Here's the page set we'd plan for a small design studio:

• Home page with your design point of view in two or three sentences and three or four signature projects.
• Project pages, one per garden, each with its own story.
• Process page from consultation to planting.
• Services page separating design-only from design-build.
• About page with the designers' backgrounds, training, and plant knowledge.
• Contact page with a short brief form.

Six or seven pages is enough for many studios. More pages only help when each one has something real to say.

How to build a project page

A project page should read like a short case story with images: the site, the problem, the design response, and the result. That's what separates a design studio from a crew that installs whatever the client sketched.

For each garden, we'd ask the studio for:

1. The starting point. A few "before" photos and one sentence on what wasn't working (drainage, a steep slope, no privacy from the street).
2. The brief. What the owners asked for, in plain words.
3. The concept. A cropped image of the concept plan or a hand sketch.
4. Materials and plants. A short list of the main stone, paving, and key plant species, with a line on why each was chosen.
5. The finished garden, photographed at its best moment of the year.
6. A later return visit, if you have it. A garden one or two seasons on shows how the planting filled in.

That last point is something most design sites skip. Gardens change, and showing a planting scheme that matured as intended is strong evidence of skill. Schedule a return photo shoot for your best projects and add the images to the same page.

Explain your process from concept to planting

Homeowners hesitate most when they don't understand how design fees work and what they get for them. A clear process page reduces that hesitation and filters out people looking for free drawings.

A typical structure for that page looks like this:

1. Initial consultation and site visit, with what it costs or whether it's free.
2. Site survey and measurements.
3. Concept design, with how many options you present.
4. Revisions and final master plan.
5. Planting plan and construction drawings.
6. Installation, either by your team or by a contractor the client chooses.
7. Plant establishment and aftercare.

For each step, say what the client receives (a scaled plan, a plant list, a material board) and what they need to decide. If the design fee is credited toward installation when they build with you, say that on this page. It's one of the strongest arguments for design-build, and many firms bury it in a proposal.

Photos and image SEO for garden projects

Photos do most of the selling on a landscape design website, and they're also how Google understands what a project page is about. Google's image guidelines recommend putting images near relevant text and using short, descriptive filenames along with alt text that describes the scene.

In practice that means a few habits:

• Name files after what's in them: dry-garden-gravel-path-pasadena.jpg instead of IMG_4021.jpg.
• Write alt text that describes the scene in a sentence, without stuffing keywords.
• Put each photo next to the paragraph that talks about it, rather than dumping every image in a carousel at the bottom.

Shoot in the right season. A perennial meadow in March looks like bare soil. If you only have one chance, photograph late spring or early summer, then add other seasons later.

For more on search, our SEO for landscapers page covers rankings beyond images.

Questions to ask before hiring a web designer

Before you sign with anyone, including us, ask these:

• Who writes the text, and how do you collect information from me?
• How do you handle project pages when I have only a few good photos?
• Can I add new projects myself after launch?
• What's in the price, and what costs extra?
• How many revision rounds are included?

Clear written answers to these tell you more than a portfolio of web designs.

How we work with design studios

We've spent 10 years building websites for landscape and interior design studios. You fill out a written questionnaire about your projects, services, and process. We write the copy from those answers, you confirm the facts, and the design follows. Calls are optional, which helps during the busy planting season.

A site starts at $1,000. A portfolio-heavy site with many project pages costs more than a compact one. Scope, timeline, payment schedule, and revision rounds are all set in a written proposal before we start. If you'd like a broader view of costs, read how website pricing works.

Related guides

• Websites for architecture practices